Harry G. Frankfurt, “The Faintest Passion”, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 66(3), November 1992, pp. 5–16 — DOI-10.2307/3130658. Reprinted as chapter 8 of Necessity, Volition, and Love (Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 95–107, and in the APA Centennial Series (Philosophy Documentation Center, 2013), pp. 59–72.
Key takeaways
Registered from second-hand sources, not a reading of the address. Each point says who reports it.
- Satisfaction. Buss and Westlund (LIT-296, n. 1, read in NOTE-267) report that Frankfurt answered regress worries “first” with “decisive commitments” and “more recently” with “satisfaction” with one’s motives, “an absence of ‘restlessness or resistance’ in response to their motivating force”, citing this essay in its 1999 reprint, without a page.
- Wholeheartedness is resolution, not peace. Velleman’s “Identification and Identity” (LIT-292, read in NOTE-268) quotes it: “Wholeheartedness does not require that a person be altogether untroubled by inner opposition to his will. It just requires that … he himself be fully resolved … resolutely on the side of one of the forces struggling within him and not on the side of any other” (NVL 100). NOTE-268 reports that he also cites it on ambivalence as a disease of the will.
- Who does not read it. Velleman’s “What Happens When Someone Acts?” (LIT-295) excludes it expressly (n. 25). McKenna and Coates (LIT-291) neither cite nor list it, and Dryden’s IEP entry (LIT-297) stops at 1987.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-04 at the owner’s request, as optional item in the batch on Frankfurt, because the record would lose something without it: it is the reply THEORY-029’s promote_when names by title and could not cite by code, and it is where the record’s readings disagree. It is philosophy of agency with no instruction for machine-learning practice, so no anthology topic holds it.
Unavailable because no lawful copy could be read (see the status note).
The dispute it would settle. McKenna and Coates (LIT-291, supplement §A) say Frankfurt amended his view so that a resigned, “drearily” given-up willing addict does not identify. Buss and Westlund’s gloss on satisfaction, an absence of resistance, would seem to let her in. Frankfurt’s own 2004 lectures (LIT-293, p. 173) count identification “in weary resignation” as identification. If satisfaction is what NOTE-267 reports, the late view admits the resigned addict and the SEP’s account of the amendment is wrong in direction. Only the address can show it.
How it bears on the theories. It is a candidate stopping point for THEORY-029’s regress: an attitude, or the absence of one, that ends the series. An absence of restlessness is specified without the agent’s participation, so on THEORY-029 it falls on the first horn, unless the address adds a condition on the agent’s stance. It is one stage of the development THEORY-120 records.
Priority for a reading: high. It is twelve pages, it is in THEORY-029’s promote_when, and it decides the resigned-addict question.
Access when seeded:
- Crossref records for the 1992 address (DOI 10.2307/3130658), the 1999 chapter (10.1017/CBO9780511624643.009) and the 2013 reprint (10.5840/apapa201318).
- Unpaywall and OpenAlex: closed.